Hyper realism in colored pencil – Kanye loves Kanye

Kanye loves Kanye, colored pencil, 46x62cm

Kanye West is known to love himself more than anything, or so one would think by the way he speaks about himself. After photographer Jason Merritt took a photo of Kanye kissing his wife Kim Kardashian at the Grammy awards, illustrator Jen Lewis started one of the biggest memes of 2016 [source]. She used photoshop to replace Kim’s head with a copy of Kanye’s and the internet exploded in joy. I was keen to take the joke a step further and spent a ridiculous amount of time drawing this portrait in colored pencil. It has then not only made the front page of Reddit but also been featured as one of the top 50 artworks of 2016 on the site.

The fact that Kanye is trying to his best efforts to remove this picture – and very harmless joke – from the internet entirely made this particular piece go into the Gallery of Psychos of hyper realistic portraits. Theme of the series is insanity, a subject I’m very interested in due to my background in psychology.

Interested in this piece for yourself or your business? Leave me a message at info@anneseelmann.de.